“I prefer Earl Grey.”
“You heard me.” He lowered some musty purple velvet drapes that looked as if they’d been cut down from prewar theater hangings. The light turned sodden and cancerous. Winnie was reminded of the bed-curtains in the Scrooge/O. R. painting, and had to suppress a snort. Did Rasia take this bozo seriously? Ritzi lit a few small pyramids of incense and disappeared behind a door. They heard him taking a piss. “It’s all zis fortune-tellink, ze tea my bladder is beink tired of,” he called out to them.
Winnie was beginning to realize that this charade was going to cost her money. But since Wendy Pritzke might take it into her head to do such a thing, the cost of the experience would be deductible as a research expense on this year’s taxes. So Winnie kept her mental Palm Pilot open. She noted the smells, the light, the dust underneath the radiator. The confusion of images on the walls, Buddhist, Himalayan, druidic; not a bricolage, but a hodgepodge, like a decoration from the inside of a high school locker, vintage Reefer Era.
“Tea,” said Ritzi Ostertag, indicating chairs, pointing: Sit.
Winnie looked about. The place was done up as a genuine tearoom, she guessed, with several small tables covered with paisley shawls, crowded around with unmatched chairs. One corner was fitted out with bookcases and display shelves, stacked with packs of tarot cards and incense sticks. A glass-fronted bookcase, crammed with some old volumes and pamphlets, was guarded up top by a skull and jawbone, real or plastic, jutting its toothy smile. In another corner a computer screen’s e-mail display had lapsed into a screen saver featuring flying monkeys out of MGM’s Technicolor Oz. Used videos, for sale or rent, were propped up on a windowsill, including The Sixth Sense, Ghost, and Blithe Spirit, as well as, for paranormal reasons indecipherable to Winnie, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
Ritzi bustled about, but it was a quiet bustling, setting a mood. He took a hand-lettered sign that read READING IN PROGRESS: PLEASE WAIT and hung it on a hook on the door, then closed the door and latched it with a hook. He disappeared, and the music emanating from the back, a techno remix of Shirley Bassey’s “Goldfinger,” was replaced a moment or two later with something sounding more like Hildegard von Bingen, sorrowful monks droning in open fourths. Ritzi reappeared, balancing cups of tea on a tray while adjusting the dimmer switch adroitly with his bare elbow. A gypsy he was not, decidedly; it was apparent in the fussiness with which he prepared the tea. He was more likely a marginal scion of a wealthy German family, playing at supernatural games while dining off dividends. The accent, the more Winnie considered, was stagy too; probably he really spoke in that new Euro-English, fairly neutral, betraying little of its origins. “In silence ve drink, ve are not talkink, I am not beink colored by your remarks,” he said. “Of your silly reservations and your scoffinks your minds to be empty, pliss. Breathe in ze varmth of ze tea and zink of ze nuzzinkness of your life.”
Not hard to do, even for a skeptic. In fact, most days, hard to avoid doing.
Winnie suddenly, again, felt the absence of her cousin, and her worry for him. How she’d enjoy retelling this bit of nonsense to him, were he waiting in the wings to hear it. How far he seemed from her, wherever he was.
The room darkened still, as if Ritzi had summoned a light cloud cover over Cowcross Street. But nothing like Hurricane Gretl or its afterbirth. Just a pressing down against the light, a purring of silence. The tea did smell nice, to be sure. It also cloaked the smell of cat piss.
“Now ve finish our tea,” said Ritzi, eyes closed, drawing out his syllables, “and ve wait, and zen”—he demonstrated—“ve put our saucers upside down on our teacups, and ve turn ze cups over and zet zem down—so—cup reversed, leaves settled. Put your hands on ze cup made topsy-turvy. Leave behind your past and your future. On ve go, deeper into ze present.”
They did so. Silence. Ritzi murmured to Winnie, stage whisper, “You, breathe.”
She had forgotten for a moment, and resumed breathing.
Upon her hands he placed his greasy palms. She observed his chewed cuticles, the soft wren-colored hairs on his upper fingers glistening in what she realized was candlelight. When had he lit candles? “You come to laugh,” he said softly. “It is no matter. In laughing some muscles relax but other muscles tighten. You must stop laughing, though, if you want to listen.” She hoped she wouldn’t belch out a rich imperial guffaw.
“Yes,” she said submissively, as if to a traffic cop brandishing a ticket pad.
“You must listen to yourself when you are ready to listen. Do not listen to me. You are laughing but it is a thin laughter and no one joins in.”
The flying monkeys kept winging, left to right.
“And upon the tea leaves let us look. So.” He lifted his hands and then hers, and set them down—they felt dead, paralyzed—on either side of the saucer. He lifted the cup, a nice ironstone second with a chipped handle and a pattern of blue vines running their mathematically spaced leaves up to the gold-leaf rim. The residue of tea leaves had fallen in a crescent shape.
His voice sounded different. Not inspired, not possessed, just softer, with more hesitations. His stage-German accent had fallen away, she noticed. It made him slightly less preposterous.
“You are a woman in need.”
No surprise there. What woman wasn’t?
“You make pictures of things, you arrange everything; you are like a governess, pushing the wardrobe here, there, rolling back the carpet, directing the sun to fall at this angle and not at that. A stager of effects.”
She tried to still her bucking doubt, for the sake of the money this would cost.
“You move from place to place. You are allowed to do so through luck or financial success. Or maybe you married well. But I think you are, if married, not all that married. He is looking the other way. You arrange his face to turn on you; you require it. He will not look. You need the thing he will not give. You look elsewhere. You move this, you move that. You move a teacup from this table to that windowsill, to ease your heart. You move it back, studying how your heart will feel. Or maybe it is people you move. You paint people, perhaps, on canvas, on little bits of paper? You move them here and there to see how they look. To see how they make your heart feel. I think you are a painter, you paint people.” He looked up briefly, but his expression was blank.
Well, he wasn’t doing so bad. Maybe you could say writing stories, even composing dreadful fake horoscopes, was painting people. But this hardly constituted telling the future; it was more like telling the present, if you could give him the benefit of the doubt about any of it.
“Here there is a window, there we find a door. A lot of water, water in all its forms. Rain and snow, oceans and tears, dew in the morning, fog at night. But not the right water. You are barren, you are void. Why are you void? This is not what you should be. Despite your age. It’s not too late.”
Rasia stirred, as if she guessed just how uncomfortable this might be making Winnie, though how could Rasia know? She couldn’t.
He regarded the tea leaves, as if studying a specimen through a microscope. “You are suspicious, yet you have so much to share,” he said. He sighed, disappointed in her. “You are full of life, yet you stamp upon it. You are like a sea horse, pretty but rigid, and far smaller than you know. You are only a little person, so stop worrying. As if it matters to the world what you do. It only matters to you. But it does matter, in its small way.” He smiled at the tea leaves, as if seeing the profile of a friend there. “Hello, small thing. Your name is Wendy.”
He looked up for the first time, confused. “Is that a name I should read here?”
“Very close,” said Rasia, who did not know about Wendy Pritzke.
“Or your sister is named Wendy. Is there another man? I see a dark man approaching—”
And riches, and travel, and children and horses and paintings and lovers. “We didn’t come for this sort of thing,” said Winnie, alarmed at all that passed for accuracy, and the ache that her gullibility revealed to her.
“We came to see if you could tell us anything about this cloth.” She found the brown throw and pulled an edge up onto the table. He recoiled.
“This is nothing to do with you, this is wild nonsense!” he said. He flicked his fingers at it, shooing. But his hands fell on it reluctantly and he closed his eyes.
“Or is it stronger than you?” he said.
“What is it?” said Rasia.
“Hush, you, you interfere with the reception.”
A clock measured out a noon’s worth of bells. On the faraway street a truck backed up. Cloud continents shifted, and behind the purple hangings, light strengthened, spent itself, and delivered the room back into séance gloom. Any minute now Ritzi would bring out a Ouiji board from the 1970s and they’d contact Elvis or Madame Blavatsky or Napoleon or James Merrill.
“Is it you with the windows, the doors, the tides of the womb, or is it someone more truly done wrong?” He looked at Winnie without benefit of misty second sight, just with the usual human severity. “You do not seem the type to allow wrong done you.”
“Who ever allows it? Still, wrong is as strong as ever,” she said.
“This thing is a woman’s garment.”
“Nonsense. No sleeves, no hem, no collar, no pleats? No bow or tuck or dart or filigree? It’s a utilitarian wrap, a bit of sackcloth.”
“It is not a blanket for a baby—”
“I’d hate to be the baby who had to cuddle in that for a blankie—”
“—but it covered a woman’s nakedness, before her life was done.”
Was she all wrong, was it not the ghost of Jack the Ripper but the spirit of one of his victims? That pretty Irish housemaid killed and her body stowed in the yawning architecture of a home under construction? But this was no woman’s body, not even a black skirt and starched apron, nothing but a filthy rag. . . .
“Come back here,” said Ritzi Ostertag sternly. Winnie jumped.
“Don’t go hiding in someone else’s mind,” he said.
“I’ve had enough of this,” said Winnie. “You’re telling us, what, that this is the blanket of some poor woman?”
“I’m telling you,” he said, “it is no blanket. It is her shroud.”
The door came open, the hook-and-eye lock pulled from the jamb. A fellow stumbled in, blinking in the gloom. For an instant Winnie thought it might be Mac hunting them again, but it was a larger man, with a big loden coat and a staticky stand of fine hair. “Jesus, you’ve gotten more secret than the catacombs, Herr Ostertag,” he said. American to the nines. “Sorry about the lock. I was leaning on your door to leave you a message.”
“The sign, you’re not welcome yet, out,” said Ritzi.
“Sorry. I won’t bother you. I’ll just finish this note and you can call me. Unless you can just sell me something while I’m here? I’m just looking for that book listed on your Web page. That monograph on Les Fleurs des chroniques of Bernard Gui, by, oh you know, who is it. Crowther. The one about the dead clavelière nun who came back from her grave to deliver the keys to her abbess—”
“It’s not for sale.”
“You advertised it.”
“I’m busy, can’t you see it, I have patrons.”
“Just tell me how much. I’ve got cash, I’ll leave it right here on the table. Sneak right out without interrupting. Excuse me, ladies, but as long as I’ve already barged in—”
“I sold it yesterday.”
“No kidding. How much?”
“Forty-eight pounds.” Ritzi smirked. “Now will you be leaving?”
“I’d have given you seventy,” said the newcomer. “You’re not much of a fortune-teller if you couldn’t see that coming. You should have updated your entry? So I wouldn’t have wasted my time? Sorry, ladies.”
“Zis mornink ze entry I am updating. You should haff rung first and saved yourself ze trip. Pliss, sir, vill you leave?” The accent was getting embarrassing. Winnie couldn’t look up for fear she’d lose it.
The customer didn’t seem to notice, or mind. “You always have good stuff,” he said. “I don’t know what deposit libraries you steal from. I don’t ask questions and mum’s the word anyway.” He unfolded a piece of paper from a coat pocket. “What about Recherches sur les phénomènes du spiritualisme, the 1923 edition out of Paris or even the first English edition, 1878?”
“I don’t haff a catalog,” said Ritzi, “in my brain. I haff to look and you’ll haff to come back. Tomorrow.”
“May I browse? Is this your new stock over here? Any back-room stuff? Anything on the Londonian Society of Psychical Research of the last century? I mean, sorry, the nineteenth century? I keep forgetting we’re twenty-first now. You can’t teach old dogs new calendars.”
“Ze sign said closed,” said Ritzi, “and now I am beink closed. Everyvone, out. You, don’t bring zat shroud back. It is for me too upsettink.”
“You didn’t read my leaves,” said Rasia, getting up.
“I am beink knackered. Your friend is too obscure, her aura is wounded. My eyes are hurtink. And zat fabric! Who can be concentratink? Besides, with you, it’s alvays Quentin, my Quentin. Too redundant. Brink me a new ghost, like zis lady, or go find another psychic.”
“What do I owe you?” said Winnie, glad to be sprung from this. But he wouldn’t take a penny.
“Not if zat’s involved,” he said, brisking his fingers at the chimney cloth. “Vhatever’s involved with zat is too much for me. I don’t vant to get involved. Out now, pliss, I’m tired, my head aches. Am I puttink on a performance here?” He slammed the door on all three of his visitors, and they filed down the steep steps to Cowcross Street, newly bleached by the next spilled cargo of sunlight.
“Well,” said Rasia. “Satisfied?”
Winnie could only laugh, but it was a fake laugh of sorts; she waved Rasia toward the Tube stop, saying, “Next time let’s smoke some peyote and try to contact some archangel or shaman or bodhisattva that way.” She didn’t want to get back in the underground, not yet. Rasia threw air kisses and disappeared. Then Winnie realized the other customer was lurching along behind her, nearly beside her.
“Sorry about that,” he said. “I aborted your session.”
“I didn’t care for what I got, but what it was, I got for free, thanks to you,” she said. “I guess I owe you.”
“The sign said closed and I didn’t mean to trespass. Did I really break that lock? I don’t think I did. Did I? I’m not exactly the Incredible Hulk.” He laughed at himself. “The Unremarkable Hulk, more like.” He wasn’t blubbery, but he was—Winnie considered the right word—portly. It was nice, for a moment anyway, to be sharing a sidewalk with a man who looked as if he could bounce the Ghost of Jack the Ripper into the gutter if it possessed the cojones to come sidling by.
A small rain hit them, on a search-and-drench mission; the other side of the street stayed dry and even sunny. “Shoot, I dropped my Old Navy rain hat,” he said, riffling his sparse hair so it looked like a stand of baby beach grass. “We’ll have to go back.”
“You’ll have to go back,” she said. “We’re not together.”
“He won’t open the door to me. Please, it’s my favorite hat. I’ll buy you coffee afterward.”
“I’ll do it on the condition you buy me no coffee and we go our own ways immediately after.”
“Deal.”
But Ritzi, seeing it was them, said, “Go avay, vhat is zis, conspiracy? I don’t vant to zee zat shroud again! I’ll ring ze police and haff you arrested. I’m closed for business. I’m plucking.” He slammed the door.
“No hat,” she said.
“What shroud?” said the American man.
“It’s still raining, would you like to borrow said shroud in lieu of your missing hat?”
“I’d rather coffee. Reconsider?”
A few doors down from Ritzi’s they found a tiny lunch place. It was nearly deserted but for an ancient slope-stomached waitress who warbled “You’re too seraphic to go out in traffic” a
s she made her way from the back.
“A full cream tea. Two of them,” declared the beefy man.
“We do fresh sandwiches. Egg mayonnaise, prawn and avocado, minty lamb, cheese and pickle, chicken tikka. On your choice of sandwich bread, bap, ciabatta, or foccacina.”
“No cream teas in central London?”
“You poor ducks, we don’t. Not since the Blitz. The cows ran away.”
“I didn’t know anyone said ‘ducks’ anymore.” He was charmed.
“Only to Americans. They like it and tip healthily.” She performed a moue for them, betrayed no surprise when they opted only for tea, and she hobbled away humming.
“Irv Hausserman,” he said.
“Opal Marley,” she replied.
“Delighted, et cetera. How’s that guy as a psychic, by the way?”
“You should try him yourself and see.”
“Had I done so, he’d have said, ‘You will leave your hat behind, and I’ll sell it back to you for forty-eight pounds plus VAT.’”
She laughed. It was a relief to laugh about nothing much. “What secrets were you there to see if he could sniff out?”
“None. I’m tedious and I have no secrets. I just wanted to buy something. He deals in out-of-print stuff, ephemera, most of it schlocky and awful, but good things with some historical interest come his way, too, so I look in whenever I’m in town. He’s a shrewd bargainer. I bet he still has the pamphlet I want. I’ll have to go back tomorrow and he’ll say he spent the afternoon hunting up another copy for me. Then he’ll charge me a hundred pounds for it, saying it’s in better condition than the one he just sold. Can’t blame him.”
He was from the University of Pittsburgh, history department, an associate professor, still pretenure because he’d come into the field late after a career as financial officer of several high-tech start-ups that skyrocketed and tanked one after the other, before he had the chance to bail. History a much more sober and safe environment.